As I sit in the back of my coworker’s English Classroom, observing the students that I have selected for my small group ELA intervention program, I keep coming back to the same problem. Most of my 10th and 11th grade students have an average reading equivalency level of only 5th or 6th grade, creating an average gap of 5 years in terms of their reading development. Regardless of this, we, as a school and a society, are asking them to perform and explain concepts at their grade level. So my question becomes, how can we expect them to explain concepts, when, in ELA or STEM subjects, the students may not even understand what the concepts are? 

My personal problem of practice is that many students in my school have difficulty understanding and decoding high level vocabulary terms in their STEM classes. These terms are classified as tier III vocabulary, or, low-frequency words that occur in specific domains,” (Hutton 2008). Typically this is due to the fact that either the literacy skills they need are not integrated into these classes and/or, they do not have the skills to translate these terms into the words they use every day, classified as tier I vocabulary.

To begin to understand just how to solve this problem and move my students in the direction of tier III vocab, I first have been trying  to put myself in my student’s shoes (Fritsch 2007). What is it like to be a student in 2024, sitting in a science class, and hearing a term like “Trophic Pyramid” and feeling so totally lost? To help with this, I turned to some of my anecdotal notes that I have taken over the years about students I have chosen to be in my intervention program.

Mainly I focused on one student I had last year. He was an 11th grade student with a reading level equivalent to a 6th grader. I will refer to him as “D” for the sake of his anonymity. Some information about D: During his time in my program he was 16 years old. He is african-american and has been in the charter system I teach in for his whole time in school. Overall, his grades were average to slightly below average, so it seemed that his lower than average reading levels did not affect his classwork too much, until I looked a bit deeper. D’s science grades dip into the mid 70s (a 69 or lower is failing at my school) and he particularly struggled in his summative evaluations. While I was unable to find him this week to ask him about this, I believe I can extrapolate this point. 

D, when he was in my group, was extremely willing to try and volunteer to answer questions, but often would give responses that were incorrect either due to his use of subject specific terms (ex. Confusing a metaphor with an anecdote) or through misinterpreting the question asked. It is more than likely that this was repeated in his STEM classes during his summative assessments, during which I could imagine he would confuse two terms that he thought had similar meanings, thus costing him points on the tests.

For me, D’s struggles in his formative assessments are emblematic of the issues facing our students. A bright, excited young man who does care for school struggles on tests due to lack of content understanding even though he is an active participant in class. Luckily, D has not been discouraged by this and still continues his active participation today, but it might explain why some students check out of learning all together. 

References: 

Fritsch, J., Judice, A., Soini, K., & Tretten, P. (2007). Storytelling and repetitive narratives for design empathy: Case Suomenlinna. Nordic Design Research (Nordes), 2.

Hutton, T. (2008). Three Tiers of Vocabulary and Education . Super Duper Publications. 

NightCafe Studios (2024).Empathy. by NightCafe Studios, 2024 (https://creator.nightcafe.studio/)